Fiona Coghlan's Rugby Diary We are at the halfway point of this year’s Six Nations championship, and we are sitting fourth in the table with one win and two losses. This leaves us with two colossal games to play at home, against Wales and Scotland.
Wales are a team that we have only beaten once, back in 2006, but never at home – though we’ve come so close in the last number of years. Meanwhile, Scotland are a side we’ve defeated on a few occasions, but already this year they have beaten France so we really can’t afford to underestimate them.
Last weekend we took on England in what posed to be one of the toughest games of the Six Nations so far, playing the champions on their home turf.
We didn’t arrive in London until late on Saturday afternoon, having trained in Dublin that morning, and we went immediately for a familiarisation session at Esher RFC. That evening we had no meetings but everyone got together to watch the men’s game which we’d recorded. We spent the entire day trying to avoid phone calls, text messages and radios so we wouldn’t hear the result! It was some match, with the final 20 minutes being particularly exciting – a great result for the lads.
With kick-off set for 3.30pm, our schedule was much tighter than previous games, but we still managed to fit everything in. There was a small bit of doubt about the game going ahead, as there was torrential rain overnight. However the referee deemed the pitch playable, so it was all systems go.
With that, we got off to a disastrous start, allowing England two easy tries in the first seven minutes. However, the second try seemed to spark something in us and we started to play proper rugby.
For the next 30 minutes we had a good bit of possession. We were struggling in the set piece but this didn’t seem to impact on us too much. We also took great heart from scoring our own try – we are the first team to score against England so far this season.
Unfortunately our concentration began to slip in the last 10 minutes and England went in for two more unanswered tries, leaving the final score 22-5. There are plenty of positives that we will take from this game, but we will also be looking to strengthen our set piece.
This was a very important match, as England are the first team we will play in the World Cup this coming August. And it was important for another reason too, as it marked the 100th Irish women’s international. The milestone was recognised by the IRFU, who presented us with specially embroidered jerseys for the occasion.
On Tuesday last, myself and two of the other girls were off to RTÉ to appear on The Afternoon Show. We were interviewed live on the show, just chatting about rugby and the commitment to the sport. I had an absolute ball and loved the idea of live television – though I was quickly brought back to earth after the show, getting texts from people giving out that I hadn’t mentioned them! You just can’t please everyone.
It hasn’t been my only appearance in front of the camera recently. Our scrumhalf Tania is doing a YouTube video blog of our time in camp, and every time she catches me on camera doing something stupid or idiotic. Thankfully she edits most of it, but I don’t know why she’s keeping the rest of the footage.
All fun and games aside, it’s a busy two weeks ahead in the lead up to the Wales game, with a fair bit of training to be done, not to mention how tied up I am withwork at the moment. But no one said it would be easy.
Fiona Coghlan is an Irish International rugby player. Her column appears every fortnight in Metro Éireann
